Here we go again; another flood and lots of earnest questions about why it happened, who’s to blame, how we can fix it, etc., etc., etc.

Comparison of the Missouri, Mississippi and Meramec Rivers water volumes – December 19th at and January 2 at bottom. (Sources: Weather Channel & NASA)

All one has to do is read old studies, not just ones you can find on the internet, but hard copy reports from “way back” in the 1970’s and 1980’s (and even much before then) to see the same questions are getting asked over and over again after each flood. The only uniquely new issue that is finally becoming ingrained within our questions today is the near complete acceptance that we have messed up our climate and it’s having an impact upon floods.

It is, however, difficult to parse and then quantify the numerous human actions that have increased the impacts of flooding. Their existence is well documented and include channelizing (narrowing) streams and rivers, placing vast amounts of impervious surfaces in urban and suburban areas, draining almost all farm land with tiles, destroying huge areas of wetlands, disconnecting floodplains from their rivers with levees (mainly for agriculture), and building inappropriate developments in floodplains. But to decide which is the worst offenders are or what bad decisions need to be corrected in what order is the dilemma. And gathering the political will required to make the corrections has always been the major obstacle.… Read the rest

By: Brad Walker – Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Caroline Pufalt – Missouri Chapter of the Sierra Club and Christine Favilla – Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club

November 23, 2015

Flooding at St. Louis – January 1, 2016

The American Watershed Initiative’s (AWI) recent overall D+ grade for the Mississippi River may be accurate, but the report is deficient in key points important to the public’s understanding of the river and their tax dollars.

Providing a report card for the basin is admittedly a gargantuan task and requires a lot of data and evaluation to accomplish. But the report is clearly biased toward “perfecting” a highly subsidized navigation system without examining the costs in tax dollars and detrimental river impacts of that infrastructure.

The report also lacks discussion of cause and effect among the elements it measures. When AWI (primarily a Nature Conservancy project) released this report card for the entire 31-state Mississippi River Basin, they graded six broad goals – Ecosystems (C), Flood Control & Risk Reduction (D+), Transportation (D+), Water Supply (C), Economy (C), and Recreation (C). Unfortunately, the promotion of the subsidized barge industry above all other interests prevents much-needed review of the effect river navigation infrastructure has on water quality, flood risk reduction, environmental health, and recreation.

Recent Post-Dispatch articles about the report card implied the D+ grade is primarily a matter of inadequate funding, especially related to the Transportation grade, which is exclusively about barge transport. Some quotes supporting this view are included below:

Among the worst-performing areas was navigation infrastructure such as locks and dams, said co-author Heath Kelsey, the director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

In an interview, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said that locks and dams were “in terrible condition” and that state and local governments could afford only so much.

Yet those quoted in the articles largely promote investing more money in the very infrastructure partially responsible for the low grades in other areas, especially the ecosystem. The culprit is the river barge system of locks and dams and the levees that primarily protect agriculture land that produces commodities that are shipped on the river.

The fact is that the construction of the Inland Waterway System (IWS) within the Upper Mississippi River, Illinois River, and Missouri River has been the prime cause of the degradation to these nostalgically called “rivers.” The barge infrastructure has had immense negative impacts upon biodiversity, the public services that a healthy river provides, and the taxpayers’ wallets.… Read the rest

Introduction

How do we value a river system? What should we count? What should we prioritize? If we decide to place dollars on everything, will that further commodify a river? If we don’t place dollars on everything, will it lead to bad decisions? All of these, and many others, are interesting questions that need consideration.

At the request of river interests, economic studies separately profiling the Lower and Upper Mississippi River basins have been completed by Industrial Economics, Incorporated over the last several years. The motivation for preparing these profiles is to attempt to document the volume of economic activity generated near the river in order to justify additional governmental spending on infrastructure, theoretically then increasing economic growth in these regions.

There are unstated underlying assumptions implied within these profiles that include:

The economic numbers are accurate

Greater economic growth is always better

Economic growth will provide increased human wellbeing

Increased economic growth will not have damaging impacts

By showing these economic numbers to decision makers we can properly increase investment in and near the river

Although the numbers are likely accurate, because these studies were based upon the erroneous philosophy of infinite resources, as reflected in our national development policies, the above assumptions are largely false. The studies admit that they do not quantify all of the values associated with the river. In fact, they do not document the primary value of a river system, its ecosystem services. By doing this they relegate the river value largely, though not completely, to the exploitation of its natural resources for economic gain, while ignoring the environmental and associated economic losses caused by these exploitative activities. This problem is discussed in a recent article titled Time to Stop Worshiping Economic Growth and more recently in an interview on National Public Radio – Questioning our Growth Fetish.

This is a distortion of our values because it not only allows, but encourages, us to destroy river environments for short-term and unequally distributed economic gain. By doing this we also impoverish future generations.… Read the rest

Apparently, When it’s in Missouri!

Before Americans began to drain the river bottoms for farmland in the early 1900s, the wetlands connected to the Mississippi River were incredibly biodiverse. Bottomlands all along the river flooded on a regular basis, leaving behind nutrient-rich silt and soil perfect for farming. We have continued to cut off land from the river ecosystem with levees all along the Mississippi River to the point that in Missouri, we have only a tiny remnant left – and this remnant is the New Madrid Floodway. If the current plan for this floodway goes forward, these important and valuable wetlands would be lost.

As this article will show, the current plan for the floodway is one of those Corps projects that should have never received serious consideration and needs to be formally de-authorized by Congress or vetoed by the EPA. The current method of operating the floodway is ridiculously dangerous, damaging, and expensive, and all of these concerns are exacerbated by a 6-foot increase in its flood stage operation level. The process for operating the floodway is vulnerable to legal and political interventions that have caused delay and can increase damages.

This article calls for a much more benign and non-controversial method to be designed and constructed, a method that takes the decision of floodway operation out of the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and judges and into the control of the river hydrology.

History of the SJBNMFP

Figure 1: Typical Levee Cross Section Source: USACE

My personal history regarding the St. Johns Bayou & New Madrid Floodway project (SJBNMFP for you acronymlovers) spans just about eight years. For nearly any other project that would be a long time. For the SJBNMFP eight years is just a blip. It requires a lot of political sway to spawn so many versions of such an unwarranted project. For those of you who do not know the evolution of this 60-year-old money pit, I will provide some historical background.

The 1927 Flood

A deadly Mississippi River flood occurred in 1927, covering about 27,000 square miles of land along the lower Mississippi River and severely impacting 700,000 people. It was considered the record flood for the Mississippi River at the time. This event prompted Congress to pass the Flood Control Act of 1928 that created the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, which authorized the construction of a system of “floodways, spillways or diversion channels” to reduce the impact of future floods on the southern portion of the Mississippi River starting at Cairo, IL, and was designed to pass a flood even larger than the 1927 flood at 2.36 million cubic feet per second.… Read the rest

MCE released the Our Future? Report in April 2012. Three years later, we are still headed down a precarious path. The report continues to be an accurate description of what is needed to move to real sustainability. Several of the major problems identified in the report have unfortunately increased in severity, including national economic disparity, the influence of money in our politics, and climate change. On the positive side, people, governments, and even corporations have increased their calls for sustainability. We see a growing recognition that things are not quite right and that we need to do something different, even if people also seem not to know who to follow or what to do. We encourage you to read the Our Future? Report, as well as this article, so that you can better understand what a sustainable river and world could look like and what it will take to attain it.

Origin of Our Future?

I’ll be frank: before 2006 I had only seen the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) a few times, typically from my car, and I knew next to nothing about it. My primary impressions were from an engineer’s perspective, admiring the construction of the numerous bridges and dams. My perspective has been flipped on its (my) head over the last 9 years while advocating for restoration of both the Upper Mississippi River and the Missouri River.

If your exposure to our major rivers has also been limited to the occasional glance out the window as you travel across them, you might be surprised to know that they’re in bad shape and largely getting worse.

It is the abuse of our rivers that prompted me to work on two major reports on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR). In 2010, after the publication of the first report called Big Price – Little Benefit regarding a Corps project to construct new locks on the UMR and Illinois River, I started to develop a report that focused more on environmental issues related to the UMR. It was obvious that the UMR was not improving and that decision-makers at all levels were focused almost exclusively upon economic growth (and at almost any cost). The question was, how can we make the connection between a healthy restored river environment and a better economy? Ultimately, it was decided that we needed to expand our message to cover economic influences because most of our environmental problems have their origin in economically-motivated (and politically-influenced) decisions.… Read the rest

Special interest politics and the abuse of power by politicians surprise no one. However, in the interest of a diligent citizenry, we have three recent examples for your entertainment that put facts and faces to this kind of behavior; all of which are affecting the nation’s dying rivers and our nation’s bank accounts.

(1) The Missouri River is arguably the most messed up river in the country. Solely for the benefit a small group of beneficiaries – barge owners and agribusinesses along the river – we have spent 100 years and about $10 billion shortening, straight-jacketing and abusing the river to the point it does not function or even look like a natural river any more.… Read the rest